IN TODAY'S RADIO REPORT: Record U.S. heat --- again; Pakistan floods and pipelines explode --- again; Arctic sea ice hits record low --- again; Cargill ground turkey recalled --- again; PLUS: Fake 'reporter' Matthew Boyle at fake 'news' site Daily Caller offers fake 'news' story on EPA, as Republicans and their fossil fuel friends open full court press against Richard Nixon's clean air and water agency --- again and again and again ... All that and more in today's Green News Report!

Extreme weather disasters, fueled by global warming pollution, dominate the nation’s news, even as the contenders for the Republican presidential nomination vie to scorn the threat of climate change. Even those who purport to accept the science of global warming, such as Jon Huntsman Jr., argue that making our climate less deadly would hurt the economy.

The blistering heat experienced by the United States during August, as well as the June through August months, marks the second warmest summer on record, according to scientists at NOAA's National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) in Asheville, N.C. The persistent heat, combined with below-average precipitation across the southern U.S. during August and the three summer months, continued a record-breaking drought across the region/

The minimum summertime volume of Arctic sea ice fell to a record low last year, researchers said in a study to be published shortly, suggesting that thinning of the ice had outweighed a recovery in area.

The study estimated last year broke the previous, 2007 record for the minimum volume of ice, which is calculated from a combination of sea ice area and thickness.

More than 60 people died Monday in a densely populated Nairobi slum after an explosion and fire caused by gasoline from a leaking pipe. At least 116 badly burned people, many of them children, were taken to hospitals. Many were not expected to survive, as medical staff struggled with shortages of blood for transfusions.

"The Tea Party's supporters today were highly partisan Republicans long before the Tea Party was born, and were more likely than others to have contacted government officials. In fact, past Republican affiliation is the single strongest predictor of Tea Party support today," he recently wrote in a New York Times op-ed.

Nor does evidence support the myth that the tea party is a libertarian-leaning faction of the conservative movement. "Americans who support the conservative Christian movement, sometimes known as the religious right, also overwhelmingly support the Tea Party," noted a February Pew poll, finding that tea partiers were more likely to support traditional conservative positions on social issues such as abortion and gay marriage.

'GREEN NEWS EXTRA' (Stuff we didn't have time for in today's audio report)...

Coral reefs will be the first entire ecosystem to be destroyed by human activity, says top UN scientist

Coral reefs are on course to become the first ecosystem that human activity will eliminate entirely from the Earth, a leading United Nations scientist claims. He says this event will occur before the end of the present century, which means that there are children already born who will live to see a world without coral.

What seems to have happened is that White House Chief of Staff Bill Daley met with industry groups who showed him a map of which counties would be forced by the new rules into non-compliance. There were a bunch of counties on the map, many of which were in states such as Florida, Virginia, Pennsylvania, and Ohio that are crucial to Obama’s re-election effort.

Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard introduced her government's controversial carbon tax plans into parliament on Tuesday, a third attempt to legislate a price on pollution.

Gillard has staked her minority government's future on passing the laws, which would force around 500 big polluting companies to pay for carbon emissions through a A$23 ($23.75) per tonne carbon tax from July 2012, ahead of emissions trading from mid 2015. Earlier plans to levy a tax were rejected in 2009.

"History will not judge us by how much economic growth we achieve in the immediate years ahead, nor by how much we expand material consumption, but by the legacy for our grandchildren and their grandchildren," he said. "We are consuming what is rightfully theirs by sacrificing long-term progress on the altar of immediate satisfaction. That is hardly responsible behaviour. There is an urgent need for all of us to concentrate our efforts on sustaining, nurturing and protecting the Earth's natural capital and, moreover, reshaping our economic system so that Nature sits at the very heart of our thinking."

A lingering drought has left more than 12.6 million people short of drinking water and huge tracts of farmland parched in China's southwestern regions, the nation's top drought-relief authority said Thursday.

It’s often claimed that the Solyndra loan guarantee was “rushed through” by the Obama Administration for political reasons. In fact, the Solyndra loan guarantee was a multi-year process that the Bush Administration launched in 2007.

The U.S. media is abuzz over last week’s bankruptcy of thin-film solar manufacturer Solyndra LLC, with some conservative politicians trying to use the demise of the start-up to argue against federal financing for green energy. But the Chinese media is focusing on a far more important solar power development: two major energy plans that will lay the policy roadmap for China’s clean energy development over the next decade.

But does such a turnaround make economic sense, or is Germany isolating itself economically? Is there danger of a deindustrialisation --- that is, will businesses relocate because of exploding electricity prices --- and will Germans have to live with blackouts? Some with political or financial interests in the status quo like to predict horrific economic effects from an energy turnaround, but a close look at German energy prospects suggests the opposite is true...

Indeed, if there was ever a time when a desperate call to take action against global warming should race through our heads as we lie in bed and stare at the ceiling, that time is now.

Many well-intentioned people will take 20 seconds out of their week to consider the consequences of the lifestyle they’ve chosen, perhaps contemplating how their reliance on fossil fuels has contributed to the rapid melting of the Arctic ice cap. But if progress is what we truly want, 20 seconds is simply not enough. Not by a long shot. An issue this critical demands at least 45 seconds to a solid minute of real, concentrated panic.

Exxon would like you to believe that climate change is neither real nor urgent. That is why they have spent millions of dollars over the last several years funding climate skeptics and fighting legislation that would regulate the emissions of greenhouse gases.
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Actions, however, speak louder than words. And Exxon’s most recent action was a thunderclap. According to reports, Exxon has just signed an extensive deal with Rosneft, the Russian state oil company, to develop promising offshore oil and gas deposits in the Arctic Ocean.
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One key thing has changed: the arctic ice is melting rapidly.

Here is a terrifying, crazy-making truth: Getting off coal will accelerate climate change, at least in the short term.

This isn't an argument for maintaining our coal addiction --- because if we stick with coal, we are, frankly, dead as a species, plus more immediately dead or at least very wheezy as individuals.
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But according to a new analysis from the National Center for Atmospheric Research, through 2050 a switch from coal to natural gas would actually accelerate climate change. Even though natural gas leads to fewer greenhouse gas emissions than coal, the "problem" is that natural gas is cleaner in another sense, too: Burning it leads to fewer aerosols in the air.